


The Butcher

by vands38



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Fate & Destiny, Gen, Magical Realism, Suicide Attempt, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, not so much a happy ending as a not sad ending, post-blaviken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:00:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25188313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vands38/pseuds/vands38
Summary: Renfri's ghost haunts Geralt as he attempts to pay the penance for BlavikenMonsters are not capable of making amends. There is a lesson to be learned here.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Renfri | Shrike
Comments: 10
Kudos: 63





	The Butcher

**Author's Note:**

> uh, I wrote this in, like, an hour? we were just exchanging angsty Geralt headcanons in the TAD discord server and then this just spilled out of me
> 
> this is super angsty and Geralt attempts suicide multiple times (only once in detail) so if that's not your cup of tea, please stop reading and find something fluffy instead -- how about [What My Heart Just Yearns to Say](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24266506) by Gavilan? Geralt POV, roughly the same length, very fluffy, very cute, not a single mention of Blaviken!

They call him a freak, a mutant, a monster. They call him the Butcher.

The Witcher carries their words like the blood on his hands. He carries this new burden out of Blaviken, and into the wilderness of Redania, and when he washes his hands in the forest stream, neither the blood or their accusations truly come clean.

––

When winter falls he does not retreat to the Witcher’s keep of Kaer Morhen but instead keeps pushing onwards, down through Temeria and Cintra and through the Amell Mountains until he is on the shores of Nazair. But no matter how fast or how far he travels, the rumour of what he has done travels faster. He is refused lodging, and food, and work, and contemplates selling or eating his own horse far more times than he can stand. He finds himself standing on the cliffs of the Great Sea, watching the ocean roar and bellow before him; a monster in its own right.

Monsters belong to monsters. 

He is methodical in his approach. He strips his armour and arranges it on the slanted pebbles into the outline of man, as if he had simply laid down, and slipped between its cracks, never to be seen again. Perhaps that is what will become of his story if he is lucky. Perhaps he will simply disappear.

He removes his swords, and his bags, and untacks Roach so that she can roam free.

She nudges him, and follows him down to the shore, but he will not be dissuaded as he takes his first steps into the vicious icy waters. “It’s for the best,” he tells her when she tries to follow. “You are free now.”

She neighs, and rears back, away from the breaking waves. The distressed cry is the last sound he hears before the ocean rears its ugly head and engulfs him whole.

–––

The ocean spits him out a mile or so downshore. 

He heaves lungfuls of cold ocean water out from his aching lungs and onto the pebbly shore. The shingle seems to scream as the water drags the small rocks away, and then hurls them back down. His alabaster skin is marred with a thousand cuts. Bruises colour his legs. His cock hangs between them, red and abrased. Chunks of his long hair have been lost to the sharp rocks below. His sword arm hangs limp beside him, broken. 

The Great Sea took him, and churned him around in her gut, before spitting him out in disgust. 

He is too monstrous for even monsters to take. 

He hears a neigh and the stamping of hooves sound above the roar of the ocean. He pries open his red salt-itched eyes to see the familiar figure of a horse galloping towards him.

He shakes his head. A cry gets caught in his throat. 

He has failed. He is a monster hunter and cannot, even as his last wish, dispose of the most monstrous creature of all. 

“No, Roach,” he croaks, when she gets near. He pushes her away with the last of his strength. “Leave me.”

She stamps her hooves impatiently before him. He squints. Something shines in the shingle between them. He fumbles in the shallows until, between grit and seawater, his fingers clutch around a familiar brooch. Renfri’s brooch.

“Fuck.”

–––

He sits by the campfire, turning the brooch over and over in his hand. He had retrieved his belongings and set camp not far from the shore; at a little copse at the base of the hill. His body aches, but he has no potions, even if he considered himself worthy of healing. He sits. He aches. He turns the brooch over in his hand.

His belongings had been a mile or so down the shore. The brooch had been wrapped in cloth at the bottom of his saddlebags. There was no explanation for its movement that would be able to comfort him. It was magic, or it was fate, and both were bullshit.

He dreams about her that night, when exhaustion finally takes him. She is sitting across the fire from him, sharpening a stick into a blade. “You’re a coward,” she says, “for wanting to die.”

“Is that why you left me this?” he says, and tries to reveal the brooch in his hands. But it’s not in his hands. It’s in the air between them, dancing between the flames. 

“Monsters are not capable of making amends,” she says, with another pass of the blade over the wood. “There is a lesson to be learned here.”

“There are no amends to be made for what I have done,” he counters. “I deserve to die. Monsters deserve to die.”

“They do,” she says, “but you are alive, so what does that tell you?”

He wakes with a scream lodged in his throat. It is dark. Dawn is on the horizon. Roach grazes in the distance. Before him, the fire has burned to embers.

He frantically crawls over to the banked fire and blackens his fingers trawling through the charcoal in search of gold. He finds it. The brooch is still warm to the touch.

–––

The next morning, he attaches the brooch to the haft of his steel sword. 

Roach watches him with curious eyes. 

“A lesson to be learned…” he murmurs, thumbing the brooch thoughtfully. The lesson, he hopes, is as simple as this. “So that I do not draw the blade again, without being reminded of the consequence.” 

–––

He tries to die another dozen times – in the jaws of a beast, or by his own hand – before he finally concedes to fate and lives. 

–––

He draws the steel blade on a narrow pass on the Amell Mountains. He was attacked by bandits and they did not heed his warning arrows. He feels Renfri’s brooch press against his palm as he turns the sword over in his hands.

“The Butcher –” they say, and he butchers them.

He shakes afterwards, covered in their blood. “I had no choice,” he whispers to the unforgiving audience of the mountain gales. “I had no choice.”

–––

When Renfri visits him again that night, he tries to ask, “Why am I still alive?”

“I already told you everything you need to know,” she says before she stands and walks off into the night. 

–––

At the next village, a grieving widow offers him twenty crowns to find her husband. “He last left for the mountains… he wore a green tunic and had eyes the colour of sapphire –”

He remembers sapphire eyes. He remembers them widening in terror before his blade tore through his flesh. 

This woman deserves an answer, but she needn’t know her departed husband’s misdeeds. 

“I killed him,” he says, and does not elaborate. 

She calls him a monster, and the word strikes true.

–––

He is at the market in Brugge. He is starving. He is freezing. His shoes no longer have soles. If the noticeboard had any contracts for Witchers, they are gone by the time he arrives. He walks back through the market, the crowd parting as the townspeople scuttle aside. He stoops to collect fallen apple cores, and scraps of metal, and anything else fallen into the mud that may be able to sustain him for one more day. He is barely alive as he suffers his penance – he is a meal away from starving, a scuffle away from dying – yet, he cannot die. He has been suspended in this purgatory for months and fears that fate will stretch his penance for decades until he is finally allowed to perish. He deserves this punishment. If he cannot die, then his suffering will suffice. 

Before him, a girl scarpers, and a crown falls to the wayside in her hurry, falling onto the cobblestones with a clatter. 

His footsteps falter.

A oren. An oren could fetch him a meal.

He senses the townspeople around him tense. He hears drawn breath, and drawn blades. But, the townspeople do not concern him.

He bends to collect the coin, and hears footsteps approaching, but heeds them no mind as he stretches his hand out towards the girl and opens his palm. 

He looks up into her face – chubby with youth, freckled by the sun, and muddy with play – and watches as she cautiously reaches out to reclaim her coin. She reeks of fear, but so does everyone in this town. She takes it. 

He stands, and turns to see four swords pointed at his face. “Leave, Butcher,” one of them snarls, “And don’t you ever return.”

He leaves, and on the way out of town, passes an apple tree in the garden of an abandoned cottage.

He lies on the straw mattress – the first time he has had the privilege in over a year – and revels in the juicy, sharp, tang of fresh apple on his tongue. 

“Is this what she meant?” he muses, as he tilts his head to see Roach grazing beneath the plentiful tree. “By making amends?” 

He snorts and shakes his head. The idea is ludicrous. He murdered innocent people in the street. No amount of kind gestures can repay such misdeeds.

–––

A few months of good deeds later, and he is hale enough to contemplate another kind of desire. He lies in the summer sun in the Velen wilderness and feels himself harden to the thought of someone between his legs. He pushes aside the urge to pleasure himself. Monsters do not deserve to feel joy, no matter how brief. 

He rises and collects a multitude of herbs to assist the local healer. He spends the humid midsummer night making potions of his own until the sun eventually fades, and he falls asleep, exhausted, against the trunk of an oak tree.

Renfri’s smile is above him. Her legs are around him. She is kissing him, deep and wet and intoxicating. He can feel her soft hair between his calloused fingertips, and then groans and clutches it helplessly, when she suddenly grinds down against him.

“It’s been too long…” he whispers.

“I know, I know…” and then she’s kissing him again, and they’re naked – he doesn’t know how they’re naked – and his member is slipping between her folds and everything is so warm and tight and perfect –-

He wakes with a gasp. The moon hangs high. The branches obscure the night sky above him. And there is the uncomfortable sensation of seed drying against his thigh. 

––– 

“Please, Butcher, don’t kill me –” the baker pleads, with his hands raised. “I don’t have any coin to pay you, but I can –”

“It’s fine,” the Witcher grunts, wiping the blood from his silver sword with a cloth. “Just don’t walk this way again. Nekkers roam these parts.”

The baker nods frantically, and tosses him a bun from his cart before scuttling on his way. 

The Witcher grunts and contemplates the sweet bread in his hands. It is the first time he has been paid for his work in nearly two years. 

–––

His shoes have soles. His stomach is not empty. He is occasionally given work. 

When he is finally given enough coin to warrant purchasing a coin pouch, he turns back to Roach with contemplation. “Hmm,” he says, feeling the foreign weight in his hands, “I’m starting to think this penance might end in something other than death. What do you think, old friend?”

Roach nickers and nudges him fondly. 

“Yes. Yes, I think so too.”

–––

He spends the next eight years making what amends he can. They call him a freak, a mutant, a monster. They call him the Butcher. He carries these words like all those that came before, but this time Renfri sits on his shoulder and guides him to make better choices. He is a monster, but this monster is attempting to make amends.

He arrives in Posada, with only two coins to his name. He buys a well-earned drink with one, and pockets the other for the road. He has not been able to find a contract in this town, but he trusts that Renfri led him here for a reason. He will sit and wait for the answer. He is in purgatory, after all, and time is of no importance to him. 

The bard is an oddity. His style of dress is odd, and his song choice is odd, and the way he is pelted with stale bread and stoops to retrieve it is oddly familiar to his own circumstances. 

The way he flirts, is also an oddity. 

Monsters do not deserve such attention. They do not deserve a name either. The Witcher diverts him the best he can, and tosses him his last coin. 

Alas, the fool follows him.

–––

He is going to get the bard killed. Monsters do not deserve companions. They do not deserve “barkers” or whatever this fool is offering. The last time he was friendly with humans, he murdered half a village. He is attempting to suffer his penance, and penance does not require a chirpy little songbird narrating – 

“– the Butcher of Blaviken!”

The words steel his resolve. He is the Butcher. He will undoubtedly get the bard killed. He halts the horse and punches the fool in the gut. 

He hopes that the bard learns his lesson and he does not follow. 

–––

He follows.

The bard stays all throughout the encounter, and all along the road, until they are setting camp by the river. The Witcher tries to make amends for punching him by bargaining for the elven lute, and it seems his offer has been accepted as the bard strums his merry little tune by the campfire. 

He shouldn’t have punched him. “I let my anger get the better of me,” he tells Renfri that night. “But he cannot follow me. I cannot be responsible for his life.”

“No one is responsible for any life but their own.”

He wants to argue that a parent is responsible for a child, but remembers that his mother abandoned him and it seems a rather futile argument. 

“He wants to stay,” she says, shrugging, and eating a bite of her apple, “so let him stay.” 

–––

The bard stays. Jaskier, is his name. He talks a lot, he flirts a lot, and gets into trouble a lot – 

“You should have heard what they called you!” he screeches, as the Witcher drags him away from yet another scuffle. 

“I know what they call me,” he grunts, as he dumps the bard unceremoniously in the mud outside the tavern. “And you needn’t concern yourself with it.”

The bard protests as he stands up and brushes the dirt from his fine dress. “I’ll concern myself with whatever I so like, I’ll have you know, and it just so happens that I am very much concerned with – oh, would you look at that, I haven’t seen a gown like that since Cidris –”

The bard is also very easily distracted. 

–––

“You don’t like my song,” he protests one evening. The bard pouts. The Witcher so rarely meets a grown man that _pouts_. “You always run away as soon as I start playing –”

“Hmm,” he says, hoping Jaskier will read what he wants from that statement. 

“And I _know_ it’s not because you don’t like my music, because I’ve been travelling with you for three months now, good sir, and I can tell that you appreciate any number of –”

“It’s inaccurate,” he says, before Jaskier can conclude his sentence. 

“Oh? The elves. I told you, it was to keep them safe –”

He grits his teeth. “‘Friend of humanity,’” he growls. “I’m no such thing. You shouldn’t glorify monsters, Jaskier. People are afraid of me and they should stay that way.”

The bard’s face does something very strange. He doesn’t loiter long enough to understand it. 

–––

A week or so later, he realises that he has a full belly, and a roof over his head, and his armour has been fully repaired. He lies on the single bed and looks across at his companion, breathing softly in his sleep.

“I don’t deserve this,” he whispers to the ghost of Renfri that he knows is looking over him. “Monsters don’t deserve…” he struggles to define what it is he feels guilty for. It’s not the possessions as such. It’s… more profound. “I don’t deserve _this_.”

Renfri sighs and slouches in the chair, stretching her legs across the bed. “You don’t ever fucking listen, do you?”

He frowns at her. 

She laughs, her head thrown back in mirth, and straightens only to shake her head at him patronisingly. “I told you all you needed to know a decade ago. Work it out, dumbass. He’ll help you,” she says, with a tilt of her head, and a soft smile, before she disappears from view.

Jaskier shuffles beside him, stirring to wakefulness. “Wassthat?”

“Nothing,” he assures the bard. “Just the breeze.”

“Mmmkay,” he murmurs sleepily, “but I still don’t like it.”

He frowns. “Don’t like what?”

“What you said,” he says on a yawn, “You’re not a monster. You’re my best friend.”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“Yes, they are. You know why?”

He grunts. “Why?” he asks, begrudgingly.

“Because I have _excellent_ taste,” he smirks, eyes opening just enough to send a sparkle of mischief across to the Witcher, before closing them again, and throwing his arm across his Witcher as if to keep him safe.

–––

The change happens so gradually that the Witcher doesn’t notice it at first. They stop calling him a freak, a mutant, a monster. They stop calling him the Butcher. Now, everywhere he goes, he is the White Wolf instead. _Geralt of Rivia, friend of humanity…_

Jaskier smiles at him blindingly as if he doesn’t see the monster beneath at all. 

He mulls over Renfri’s words, exactly as she had advised. The words were spoken long ago, but he remembers every one of them.

 _Monsters are not capable of making amends..._ she said, but he has, it is evidenced by the people’s forgiveness.

 _Monsters deserve to die…_ he said, _but you are alive, so what does that tell you?_

“...that I’m not a monster at all.”

“Sorry, what was that?” Jaskier asks, startled out of his composition, as he turns to look back at his companion.

“She kept me alive because I’m not…” he shakes his head and halts Roach in the middle of this dirt track road. “Do you truly not see me as a monster?” he asks Jaskier. 

Jaskier has obligingly come to a stop as well, even his restless fingers have paused in their movements against the fretboard, as he turns back to look at his Witcher. 

“You know what I’ve done,” he emphasises, “yet you… do not see me as a monster?”

“No,” Jaskier says with certainty. “I see you as a man with regrets. No one who seeks amends as much as you do can be classed as a monster.” 

He closes his eyes as the weight of words he has carried the last decade fall from his shoulders. After all these years, he finally understands, because he heard Renfri’s words fall from Jaskier’s mouth. 

“Geralt?” Jaskier asks. “Geralt, are you okay?”

Geralt. 

Yes, Geralt. That is his name. He is not a monster. He is not the Butcher. He is Geralt of Rivia – a friend of humanity. 

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr link](https://vands88.tumblr.com/post/623281849150652416/the-butcher-the-witcher-tv-gen-m-3k%20rel=)


End file.
